An enhanced differential evolution algorithm with fast evaluating strategies for TWT-NFSP with SSTs and RTs (Q2225197)

Summary: The no-wait flow-shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and release times (i.e., the NFSP with SSTs and RTs) is a typical NP-hard problem. This paper proposes an enhanced differential evolution algorithm with several fast evaluating strategies, namely, DE\(\_\)FES, to minimize the total weighted tardiness objective (TWT) for the NFSP with SSTs and RTs. In the proposed DE\(\_\)FES, the DE-based search is adopted to perform global search for obtaining the promising regions or solutions in solution space, and a fast local search combined with three presented strategies is designed to execute exploitation from these obtained regions. Test results and comparisons with two effective meta-heuristics show the effectiveness and robustness of DE\(\_\)FES.